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I have a 4 port wifi router at home. Everything on the network is connected through that.

I have 5 machines on the network. One of them is a fresh Debian 8 (Jessie).

On all of the devices except the Debian one I can ping other devices by hostname. On the Debian one I cannot. I can ping by IP but when I try by hostname it says "unknown host".

user@debian:~$ ping comp1
ping: unknown host comp1

user@debian:~$ ping 192.168.1.100
PING 192.168.1.100 (192.168.1.100) 56(84) byes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.1.100: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=1.24 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.100: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=1.04 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.100: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.965 ms
...

I can't figure out how to fix it. Any ideas?

This is my /etc/hostname, /etc/hosts, and /etc/resolv.conf

nacho@desk:~$ cat /etc/hostname
debian

nacho@desk:~$ cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1   localhost
127.0.1.1   debian
127.0.0.1   debian

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1     localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters

nacho@desk:~$ cat /etc/resolv.conf
# Generated by NetworkManager
nameserver 192.168.1.1
nameserver 127.0.0.1
nameserver 127.0.1.1
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    Use avahi and libnss-mdns. Those hostname aren't real hostnames (dns), they communicate with avahi protocol. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avahi_(software)
    – Ipor Sircer
    Commented Aug 27, 2016 at 15:09
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    Are the other hosts windows servers. If so they are may be using WINS to resolve names.
    – BillThor
    Commented Aug 27, 2016 at 19:07
  • Thanks guys! Got it to work by using a custom firmware on my router.
    – IMTheNachoMan
    Commented Aug 27, 2016 at 19:22

2 Answers 2

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Are the other hosts windows servers. If so they are may be using WINS to resolve names. Installing winbind and add wins to the /etc/nsswitch.conf file line for hosts should resolve the issue.

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  • Thanks! Got it to work by using a custom firmware on my router.
    – IMTheNachoMan
    Commented Aug 27, 2016 at 19:22
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    @IMTheNachoMan That will work. You now have dnsmasq returning DNS records for all the clients that connect using DHCP.
    – BillThor
    Commented Aug 27, 2016 at 19:25
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So I installed OpenWRT on my router (something I was planning on doing anyway) and that seems to have fixed the issue.

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